A Reading Resolution

Related Books:

Back in 2011, my cousin bought me a copy of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson for Christmas. The biography had been released a couple of months earlier, less than three weeks after Jobs’s death, and had become an immediate bestseller — one of those books that makes the transitional leap from the bookstore to the “impulse-buy” shelf by the supermarket checkout, and the kind of thing I snobbishly regard with suspicion while waiting to pay for my kale.

I really had no notion as to why my cousin would choose to buy this particular book for me. I am not only something of a luddite, but am also a sworn enemy of Apple, the company which Jobs co-founded. During my teenage years, I spent most of my savings on an iPod Mini, only for the battery to die after 11 months. Although it was covered by a one-year warranty, when I made my claim they told me that for battery-related issues the warranty is a mere six months, and that the cost for one of their technicians to replace the battery would be almost as much as the iPod itself. After that experience, I swore I would never buy another of their overpriced products again, and have held a deep personal grudge against Jobs and his cohort ever since.

Thus when I opened the wrapping paper on that Christmas afternoon five years ago to find myself confronted by the arrogant stare of Steve Jobs, I smiled and said a polite word of thanks, and then immediately disregarded the book, exiling it to a bottom corner of my bookshelf, where it has been gathering dust ever since.

Earlier this year, for my birthday, I received a copy of the recent Danny Boyle/Aaron Sorkin film Steve Jobs on DVD. (Yes, I still watch DVDs. I told you I was a luddite.) Although the subject of Jobs did not strike me as being any more interesting in 2016 than it did in 2011, and I still had not forgiven him for the iPod Mini incident, it seemed as though some invisible hand in the universe was intent on forcing him into my life, and so, encouraged by the row of five-star reviews on the DVD cover, I decided to give it a chance.

I ended up being surprised not only by how much I enjoyed the film, but how interesting I found the historical context of Apple and the early days of developing computer technology. The film stayed in my mind for a few days, and, becoming unexpectedly eager to dig a little deeper into the facts behind the fictionalized Sorkinese dialogue, I decided to commit myself to trying out the 600-page Isaacson tome on the much-mythologized Jobs.

Lo and behold, the book I had not given a second glance half a decade ago ended up being one of my favorite books of 2016. That is not to say that it converted me to the Church of Apple, but it introduced me to new perspectives on technology that I had not previously considered, such as why Jobs believed it was essential that the iPod Mini had no convenient flap to easily replace a dead battery, and the advantages and disadvantages that stem from this “closed system” model. Jobs never wanted the seams or screws to be visible on any of his products, wishing them to be complete entities in themselves, which could not be corrupted by any inferior outside components. This approach yielded great success for Apple, and helped bring a sense of beauty into the world of computing, which had previously been dominated by clunky and unattractive machines.

As someone who has grown up in the age of computer technology, I suppose I had never questioned many of these digital facts of life before. To me, elements such as the great Apple/Microsoft divide have simply always been part of the natural order of things, and it had never really occurred to me how intertwined the destinies of the two companies have been, and how the progress of computer technology might have turned out entirely differently had either one of them not existed.

I learned more from Isaacson’s biography than I have from a single book in a long time, simply by virtue of the fact that it concerned a subject I previously knew nothing about and assumed I had no interest in. It is a credit to Isaacson that he manages to make the complex evolving world of computer technology so accessible and fascinating to a novice like me; when he concludes that Jobs will be placed “in the pantheon next to Edison and Ford” I can now see where he is coming from, where previously I would have, in my ignorance, snorted in disbelief at the notion.

The Edison and Ford comparison strikes me as particularly apt, in that Jobs was not necessarily the greatest engineer himself, but seems to have had the clairvoyant ability to see the potential in other people’s inventions and predict what the customer wanted before they themselves knew. With this greatness came a darker side to his personality, which allowed him to take credit for other people’s ideas, berate his employees for not being able to meet his impossible standards, and neglect his familial responsibilities. Isaacson does not shy away from these more negative qualities, and is able to portray the complexity of Jobs — a man you may admire, but would probably not invite to your home for dinner — while also preserving that aura of enigma which inevitably surrounds anyone who achieves things that defy easy explanation.

Steve Jobs was not necessarily my favorite book of the year (that title would probably go to Stefan Zweig’sBeware of Pity) but it affected me in the most significant way, and will probably be the book I end up recommending most often. It is a book which, for one pretentious reason or another, I considered to be outside of the realm of my interest, and it never would have occurred to me to read it had it not fallen into my lap.

It also reminded me of something that is easily forgotten: namely, that the unexpected book has the greatest potential to surprise you, and offers the greatest potential for learning outside of one’s normal cultural sphere. Without even noticing it, many of us are guilty of trapping ourselves into small pockets of literature.

So, inspired by my enjoyment of Steve Jobs, I am making a New Year’s resolution to embrace the unexpected book; to make an effort to read things I have never heard of, on subjects I know nothing about. If 2016 was able to introduce me to the book that would finally allow me to forgive Steve Jobs for the iPod Mini, I’m looking forward to seeing how my mind will be changed by the unexpected books of 2017.

Christian Kriticos
is a freelance writer and heritage fundraiser, with degrees in English from Durham University (UK) and Northwestern University. He has lived in Saudi Arabia, England, the United States, and Scotland, where he currently works at Abbotsford, the historic home of Sir Walter Scott.

1.
Peter Parker was born in 1945 and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, under the care of his uncle and aunt. Ben Parker was a gentle man. May was a doting but naïve caregiver. Peter was a prodigy and Ben and May Parker encouraged his scientific aspirations. It was a happy home, but at school Peter was the target of low-key verbal bullying and though an outside observer would have considered the taunts mild, they amounted to a form of abuse that haunted him well into his adulthood.
In the early 1960s, several young men and women in the New York City area gained superhuman powers thanks to a series of nuclear experiments held in violation of rudimentary safety codes. That was Peter’s story. He was at a certain place at a certain time and a radioactive spider bit his hand. Within 24 hours, his body underwent a metamorphosis. He was now faster, stronger, and more agile than most members of the human race and possessed a sixth sense which warned him of danger. He sewed a red-and-blue suit which showed off his new thin-muscled body, a body he was proud of and for which he had done nothing to deserve.
He entered and won a wrestling contest. He was a great success, but he was too young to appreciate his good luck. In a moment of self-absorption, he failed to stop a thief. By coincidence that criminal would later kill Ben Parker, and upon discovering the consequences of his selfishness, the teenager decided he would use his powers to help others. He invented webbing fluid, a potent but non-lethal weapon which allowed him to swing across the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan and trap opponents in viscous nets. He became Spider-Man, an amazing addition to the New York skyline. A hyphen separated the two parts of his name.
2.Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Peter Parker first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 in December 1962. In his debut, he was friendless, miserable, and smarter than everyone in every room he ever walked into. Ditko, a former horror comics artist, had learned to draw humans at their most vulnerable and grotesque and his Peter Parker was an attenuated figure, handsome but not too good-looking, a little damaged. In the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man Parker proved to be a very good superhero, but he wasn’t slick and that was part of his charm. “Isn’t there just a little of Peter Parker in all of us?” That’s the final line of The Amazing Spider-Man #27, from August 1965. In that issue, he loses his uniform and had to make do with a cheap version he picked up in a costume shop. Spider-Man lost his mask in fights. He also lost fights. He fought common colds while in the middle of fights. The superhero who could be you.
Peter Parker was Spider-Man for many reasons and not all of them could be named. He suffered an oppressive guilt for the death of his Uncle Ben, but guilt wasn’t enough for him to do what he did; Parker doesn’t even mention his uncle for three years following the origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15. The truth is that Peter Parker enjoyed being more powerful, better than his peers who made fun of him and better than the criminals he fought. His social circle knew nothing about his abilities, and he took an arrogant pride in his secret identity. He was a sadist, within limits. He never killed anyone, but he enjoyed humiliating and hurting his opponents, taunting them with one-liners -- he was a Woody Allen fan but he lacked Woody Allen’s talent -- and he rarely softened a punch even when fighting those he could crush with two fingers. He started fights with Johnny Storm, the good-looking member of the Fantastic Four and the subject of Parker’s envy and admiration. He was a narcissist.
He was also Spider-Man because he needed money. He sold photographs of his fights with criminal misfits and ugly men to J. Jonah Jameson, the publisher of Now! and The Daily Bugle, who wrote editorials prejudicing the general public against the young superhero. Peter’s freelancing helped his Aunt May survive her widowhood and earned him spending cash. But in the end, he was profiting off of violence, on fights that he sometimes started. He was also a dishonest journalist. After he failed to photograph a battle with Sandman, he restaged it using large piles of sand.
Yet he was, at heart, a good man and he suffered for his goodness. In Amazing Spider-Man #1 he flirts with the idea of crime in order to help his Aunt May save their house, but he eventually takes pride in his basic decency. He privately acknowledged the good in even his worst bully, Flash Thompson. He was devoted to his aunt. He continued his work as a vigilante even while facing a public that hated him. He honored that role no matter how much it disrupted his personal life.
He grew older, his posture improved, and he found himself in a series of relationships with beautiful women who noticed his charm and his blue eyes. But he was an incompetent and absent lover, more loyal to his secret identity than he was to his women, though he did save their lives on numerous occasions. In the context of the time, he was strangely under-eager to take advantage of the sexual revolution. His life as a superhero could be exhilarating, but it brought him only so much joy. He was a loner. He was also a lonely man.
Thanks to the open-ended, half-planned nature of comic-book serial storytelling, Lee and Ditko could discover new facets of Peter Parker’s psychology in small ways from one month to the next, allowing the man to contradict and amend himself to the point where his heroism was as strange as the anti-heroism of Walter White, his pop-cultural antithesis. John Romita took over for Ditko in Amazing Spider-Man #39 in August 1966 and completed Parker’s transformation into a romance-comics heartthrob, discovering the depression inherent in the young man’s doleful charm. So no, it’s not so much that Spider-Man was the superhero who could be you, though Lee used that very phrase in the comics. Spider-Man was one of the few superheroes who was more interesting than the supervillains he fought.
3.
Spider-Man and Peter Parker were inventions of New York, not the New York of our world, but a New York, despite all Lee and Ditko’s use of proper landmark names, that was as foreign as Metropolis or Gotham City. When Marvel Comics introduced a new Spider-Man in its Ultimate Universe a few years ago, one who had a black father and a Latino mother, the decision only highlighted one of the weirder elements of the world Lee and Ditko created 50 years before. Parker was a working-class teenager growing up in 1960s Queens and yet his social circle -- Mary Jane Watson, Gwen Stacy, Flash Thompson, Betty Brant, Ned Leeds -- did not include anyone with an obvious white-ethnic marker, an Irish, Italian, or Jewish name. The interior of Parker’s high school was based on the one Ditko attended in Johnstown, Penn. When Parker graduated high school he entered Empire State University, an amalgam of Columbia and City College, which again, oddly, had strikingly few non-white-ethnics. He mostly fought petty hoods who spoke like '40s B-movie gangsters. Parker’s world was lily-white until issue #51 (August 1967), when Robbie Robertson, a black man, takes a city editor position at The Daily Bugle, and drug-free until issues #96 through #98 (May-July 1971), when Harry Osborn faces the consequences of his acid trips. And as much as he fancied himself an outsider, he was very much at home in his version of the city.
This New York provided a template against which Peter Parker, with all his self-doubts and all his angst, could invent himself. The superhero genre had existed for at least three decades before he showed up, and part of Parker wondered if he was a kind of Don Quixote, dressing up and playing out a fantasy for a world that did not need his heroism. But this particular New York did need him. The presence of supervillains, of the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus, always prepared to kill thousands, suggested that this shadow New York was under constant threat of annihilation. In our world, Peter Parker would be a true madman. (Actually in our world, the U.S. government would have captured and held him in a terrible facility and re-engineered him into a super soldier. It also would have figured out a way to turn his webbing fluid into either a torture or lethal weapon on a massive scale. Imagine a giant thick substance designed to cover entire cities and suffocate all of its inhabitants.) But Parker challenged his homogenous version of New York and made it more interesting. In his New York, he could be a most beautiful man, like Don Quixote or Jean Valjean or Samuel Pickwick -- Dostoevsky’s three famous examples of the archetype -- a figure whose greatest creation, born out of neurosis and genius, is himself.
This is why he is loved. This is why you want to be him. And this is why he is not the superhero who could be you.
4.
The problem with Spider-Man is the same problem with all popular comics heroes. Eventually, after several hundred issues, he hit a moment of stasis in which he stopped evolving, stopped discovering the strange hidden facets of his personality.
Still, writers and artists attempted and sometimes succeeded in putting their signatures on Parker. In July 1973, Gerry Conway, Gil Kane, and Romita killed off Gwen Stacy in the middle of a fight between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. There is a consensus among fans that she died from whiplash from the web Parker shoots to save her, thus providing a space for a new form of a guilt for Parker to explore. I was 10 when I got into reading my older brother’s collection from the late '80s. That Spider-Man was still interesting. He was a college dropout, fighting to make rent, seriously wondering how he wasted his intellectual talents in the interest of crime fighting. But within a few years, after he married Mary Jane Watson, he ceased to be credible. In the early '90s, Todd McFarlane’s artwork exaggerated Spider-Man’s contortionism, while his writing accentuated his sadism and diminished his wit, transforming one of the great geek heroes into a dumb jock. By the 2000s, the storylines within the regular Marvel continuity had achieved a level of absurdity that demanded retconning. In one limited series set in the future, Parker’s radioactive semen kills Mary Jane. Marvel writers in their attempts to be gritty, had become the equivalent of literary novelists who reach for Holocaust references as substitutes for gravitas. Their fascination with ultra-violence obscured the essence of Spider-Man.
Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’sUltimate Spider-Man, which launched in September 2000, started everything over again, and attempted to return the hero to his roots. In Bendis and Bagley’s version, Parker was a millennial and his Uncle Ben and Aunt May were aging hippies. And Parker looked to John Hughes movies for inspirations for his one-liners. “It’s almost Shakespearean in the sense that the theme of it, the morality of it, all of it holds true,” Bendis told me in an interview that appeared in Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimatum. “And you can change the setting, you could put it all on a space station and the story of Peter Parker getting bit by a spider would resonate all these ideas. So once I came to terms with that, that I’m adapting a work by Shakespeare, it became very freeing.”
Bendis and Bagley did capture Peter Parker’s morality. Their stories were cleanly plotted, Bendis’s writing was slick, and Bagley’s pen, and later that of Stuart Immonen who replaced him in the 111th issue (September 2007), looked more to Romita’s romance than Ditko’s horror ethos for inspiration. And yet that slickness and Peter’s unquestionable decency formed the title’s main flaw. Bendis’s Parker was a little too charismatic. The characters in the Ultimate Universe loved him more than any of the comic’s readers could. I liked the comic myself, but a true Spidey agoniste would have preferred the Peter Parker of the Ditko and Romita years.
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy was a throwback to the Ditko and Romita years. All three of his movies, even the much maligned Spider-Man 3, have fine moments, though they spend far more time studying Peter Parker’s guilt than the other more disturbing aspects of his personality. Raimi’s horror-movie pathos turned Spider-Man’s villains into tragic figures. Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, in his final moments, rediscovers a moral clarity and sacrifices himself in order to undo his evil plans. Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman attempts to grasp his dead wife’s wedding ring even as his fingers dissipate into tiny molecules. Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man is sweet, naïve and gentle, and a fine presence, but he exists to counterbalance the weight of evil and age more than to exert his awesome self.
Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker in Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man movies, themselves modeled on the Bendis/Bagley and the Bendis/Immonen runs, is the most physically interesting one we’ve seen on screen. He’s discovered the line between Parker’s teenage awkwardness and Spider-Man’s athleticism, Parker’s brooding charm and Spider-Man’s power, and beneath it all there lies his constant melancholy. He’s a young-adult hero with a riot of conflicting rages that recall those suffered by Lee and Ditko’s Parker. Working with a by-the-numbers screenplay, Garfield reimagines a beautiful man, a flesh-and-blood being, that otherwise would have been nothing more than a symbol, or, considering the nature of Sony and Disney/Marvel’s competing interests, a trademark.
5.
The Peter Parker of the regular Marvel Universe has no real fears in any of his battles, which he always manages to survive. He’s barely aged 10 years in the 52 since he first appeared. Immortality has erased the stakes of his existence. He has no reason to evolve. These are the kinds of story-telling decisions, made in the interest of the profit motive, that can rob a character of his soul.
The best thing about the Peter Parker of the Ultimate Universe is his mortality. He dies at the age of 16 in Ultimate Spider-Man #160 (August 2011) saving his aunt, his friends, and his neighbors from the Green Goblin. Unless something happened in between the panels that Bendis did not mention, he dies a virgin. And he does not come back. Death makes his sweetness and his goodness tragic and beautiful. It makes Peter Parker human, and, in at least one particular way, a superhero who could be you.
I don’t imagine the Spider-Man Lee and Ditko created in 1962 dying in any major battle, but I do imagine an alternate reality for him, one that diverges from the Marvel storyline sometime in the early '70s, when Parker is still in college. He realizes at that point that he’s gone about as far as he could go as Spider-Man, which was always a fun but immature project. He learns to dislike violence and prefers helping people in more peaceful ways. He spends more time in costume at children’s hospitals, and eventually starts showing up out of costume. More superheroes have shown up in New York, and most of them, he’s now humble enough to realize, are better at crime fighting. He goes for one last night-swing, comes home to his apartment, folds up his costume and places it in a box at the back corner of his closet.
He starts dating more and notices that he has fewer inhibitions. After breaking up once with Mary Jane Watson, he starts dating a handsome man he meets in a chemistry lab. It goes on for a few months, he discovers a form of affection he didn’t realize he was capable of, but he returns happily to Mary Jane.
He graduates college. He forgoes a hard career in science after he discovers an allergy to corporate structures and a love of teaching. He teaches in one of New York’s magnet programs while at home he tinkers with his brilliant inventions, creating all sorts of wonders far more interesting than web fluid. He decides to keep his work to himself.
He marries Mary Jane and they have children. They enter into a routine by the time they hit their 40s. On Friday nights, they go up to the rooftop of their Park Slope home. Mary Jane lights up a joint. He performs some mild acrobatics. Then they go back downstairs.
The kids graduate high school. They graduate college. They get married and give him grandchildren.
And then Peter Parker, the most beautiful man New York has ever known, dies.
Image Credit: Wikipedia

Jeff Hobbs grew up amid the perfumy mushroom farms of Kennet Square, PA. He is the author of the novel, The Tourists, as well as dozens of grant proposals written on behalf of the African Rainforest Conservancy, for which he served as Executive Director for three years. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and the little girl within her ballooning belly, and he talks mostly to his dog, Noah.Dear Mr. West,On behalf of my daughter, who is due on October 8th and so thus far has been shielded by the womb from the loud, generally vacuous remarks of all current celebrity-cum-philosophers - and on behalf of every child living in America who has ever been negatively influenced by a "Kanye-ism" - I would just like to say: Shame on you, 'Ye.Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.These are your words that you employed, oddly enough, while promoting your own forthcoming book, Thank You and You're Welcome. This tome of "theories" is reportedly composed of 52 pages and possibly fewer words, since many pages contain only a single almost-sentence, and others are left blank - perhaps a nod toward your blank sense of responsibility for those who pay attention to what you say. Your self-purported intent is to "end the confusion" of Kanye misquotes, which has apparently been plaguing the universe for some time now.Just a heads-up here: Not only does the inherent irony at play in these words make you appear unintelligent, which you obviously aren't, but you have also undermined the privilege of living in a country in which we can read anything and everything we choose or, as in your unfortunate case, nothing at all. Though you may be a self-proclaimed "proud non-reader," surely you cannot be proud of rallying others to follow you in this non-ambition.My understanding is that you are a remarkable musician and producer, termed by many a musical genius. You have sold millions of records, won the highest awards, started a respected charitable foundation to help underprivileged children stay in school, cultivated countless fans the world over, and become a bona fide voice of your generation. At the very least, you are that rare talent who appeals to a fan base as demographically diverse as it is ardent.So how could you, the son of an English professor no less, say something so destructive, so moronically conceived, and so contrary to the vaguely youth-centric message of your own music? I ask this question in seriousness and with all the respect I can summon, which admittedly isn't much at the moment.With regard to the first part of your statement, I grant that the novel as a form, excluding your own, tends to be somewhat "wordy." It is, after all, typically composed of words. And plenty of the greatest novelists - Hemmingway, Rushdie, Naipaul, and Mailer come to mind - could correctly be dubbed "self-absorbed," bordering on self-obsessed. It does require a certain amount of arrogance to believe a work of fiction that originates in your brain might be worth a stranger's time, let alone his money. You know this arrogance very well; in fact, you have coined your own special term for it: Flyness.Incidentally, our president is wordy and self-absorbed, and he might turn out to be the flyest leader we've ever had. There are wordy and self-absorbed carpenters out there, and doctors and schoolteachers and, with you as a standard-bearer, musicians - all of whom have contributions to make to society. In many ways, America is a wordy and self-absorbed nation. We are no less fly for being so.So while those two descriptive gems are ultimately harmless, what I shame you for is your presumption to take away, or at the very least discredit, the unique, valuable, and timeless relationship that a child can forge with the world through books.The written word is the only art medium that necessitates a sincere, sometimes even arduous, effort on the part of its audience. Rather than enter instantaneously into the individual's heart and soul via a direct, simple sensory channel - most commonly sight and sound, and, in the case of a great chef, taste and smell - a printed word must first be filtered, interpreted, and aligned with one's consciousness through both the right and left sides of the brain; the sensations an inspired sentence brings to bloom within the individual's interior represent a collaboration between author and reader, a synthesis of dual experience in this world. This special co-mingling can occur between two people who grew up neighbors in the same small Midwestern town, or between a 12-year old Catholic girl in the Bronx reading the words of an 80-year old Hindu man in Calcutta. Basically, what I hope to teach my daughter is that, though reading usually necessitates seclusion - not an easy concept to pitch to a kid, or, apparently, to a hip hop artist - the more you read, the smarter you become; opening a book is a completely self-generated means by which a child may grow more thoughtful, more worldly, more sensitive to others, regardless of what school district he lives in or what his standardized test scores are.A novel takes you away like no other medium can, and while a multi-millionaire music mogul like yourself has no doubt lived an extraordinary "real life" - has experienced directly so many fascinating people and places most of us ordinary folks could never dream of - the majority of your fans, and 99.9% of Americans, do not have the time nor the means to emulate you. Most of us would very much like to "get information from doing stuff," as you sagely advise, if only our access to the world beyond our immediate environment weren't limited, basically, to books, television, and music. I venture that escaping into the work of Harper Lee, Jack London, Alice Walker - hell, even Stephenie Meyer, who can barely write an English sentence - is more worthwhile for American youth than, say, watching an MTV Cribs episode featuring Kanye West, or listening to such classics as "Dreaming of Fucking Lil' Kim," even in hi-def surround sound.And yet, the written word is being slowly phased out of our culture, no thanks to comments such as yours; it is becoming increasingly apparent that the slow, solitary act of paging through a book has only marginal space on today's manic, hyper-social canvass. Newspapers are streamlining one by one to cut costs, and the first step in that process invariably entails nixing the Books section. American publishers are faring little better than the auto industry, sans taxpayer bailout. We live in an era in which the first stories some kids read are penned by Madonna, Sesame Street is considered "unhealthy" (because the Cookie Monster promotes obesity, you see), Gawker is a premier source of literary news, snark reigns supreme, the vast majority of written correspondence involves progressions of three-letter acronyms ricocheted across cell phone towers, and, sadly but truly, the blurted opinions of Kanye West actually count for something.Being as your charitable work is geared toward furthering the education of our children, being as the country reads less now than it ever has in its history at the same time as our school system falls behind those of other developed nations, being as you are technically an author now, and being as you are and will remain a role model to so many tens of millions of people - perhaps you, Mr. West, might atone for your statement by (just a thought here) finding a book that means something to you and then recommending it to your fans, thus investing your words in their future rather than your own.To quote you once more, from your song, "Champion": "'Cause who the kids gonna listen to? Huh? I guess me if it isn't you."Best Regards,Jeff Hobbs (Proud Reader)

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.It’s the first line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between. The narrator, now a melancholy, middle-aged man, remembers a hot summer spent at a friend’s home in Norfolk, in 1900, when he was 13 years old. Surrounded by adults busy with their own lives and tangled up in their own affairs, he’s drawn into a plot between a woman and her lover that leaves him bewildered and ultimately disillusioned with life: used and abused, damaged in some obscure way. In many ways the novels of Patrick Modiano are similar stories of young people who, now much older, try to make sense of a past that truly is foreign to them, populated by men and women who cling to the shadows, whose very words beg for translation and meaning, as though their deeds and their language were somehow a mask, behind which lies in its deep place the truth. Thus a Modiano novel is also a kind of detective story: the narrator searching for a face to go along with a name, a name to label a person in a photo, a home that might be reached by a phone number once jotted in a notebook. It’s as though his separate memories lack the connective tissue of what might be called one’s life story.
An author’s body of work is typically never consistent. There are the very good books, the perfectly adequate books, and then there are the out-and-out duds. Authors take risks and sometimes they don’t pay off. Authors get lazy, and the result is for all to see. But to find a writer whose nearly 30 titles are so consistent in quality, not to mention in tone, style, and subject matter, is a rarity. Apart from his first published novel, La Place de l’Étoile, set during the Nazi Occupation of Paris and narrated by a half-mad Jew named Schlemielovitch, the novels of Patrick Modiano have followed a certain quiet pattern: the protagonist is typically a man, often a writer, who, coming across a name or a photo, or even a telephone number (which feature prominently in his work, and often migrate intact from one book to another), begins to sense that this could be the key to a troubled, half-remembered past. What in that brief description might seem the recipe for dullness is in fact the foundation for a rich body of work.
There is a difference, however, in his 17th novel, La Petite bijou, translated by Penny Hueston as Little Jewel and published by Yale University Press in their Margellos World Republic of Letters series. The main character here isn’t a man but rather a 19-year-old girl, Thérèse, “Little Jewel,” as her mother called her, because “she had to have something else that she could show off like a piece of jewelry: that’s no doubt why she gave me my name.”
Thérèse works in a half-hearted way looking after the young daughter of a well-off couple virtually oblivious to the desires and concerns of their child. What the parents are involved in is never made clear; very possibly it’s something criminal. Like so many of Modiano’s protagonists, and just like the child she looks after, Thérèse is a young woman trapped in a world not only of adults and their coded language but of half-memories and broken relationships. As Denis Cosnard points out in his indispensable critical biography, Dans la peau de Patrick Modiano, Little Jewel is based on a true story drawn not, as in so many of Modiano’s books, from his own life, but rather from a history dating from the 1940s about an actress whose daughter was known as “Petite Bijou.” It was only after the novel was published that the daughter of the real Petite Bijou contacted him to tell him that her mother, Eliana Gardaire, then 65, was still alive, leading him to alter some of the names in the book to give them some distance from the author’s creations.
It’s a simple story, one that grows richer with each reading: Thérèse spots a woman in a yellow coat on a moving walkway in a métro station, and begins to suspect this may be the person known to her and others as “the Countess,” with whom she’d lost contact so many years earlier. “She was standing next to me. I saw her face. She was so like my mother that I thought it must be her.” All the daughter knows is that the Countess had died in Morocco many years earlier (as indeed Eliana Gardaire’s own mother met her death, in a car accident that may have been a suicide). Like many Modiano narrators, Thérèse begins to follow this woman, as though she were leading the woman who may be her daughter down a path into memory and answer.
As in so many of his novels, Modiano’s obsession with places, names, phone numbers, and those mysterious telephonic zones of intermediacy where people can dial a number and exchange information in a kind of background haze, frail voices trying to connect, reappear in the author’s 2012 novel, L’Herbe des nuits, translated by Mark Polizzotti as The Black Notebook and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The narrator, Jean, populates the streets of Paris with those who have walked it long before: the 19th-century writers Gérard de Nerval, Tristan Corbière, and Charles Baudelaire, whose mistress, Jeanne Duval, floats wraithlike through the pages, as though saying that the past never truly leaves its roots, that the ghosts of the people who once walked these streets linger on forever. Unlike in his other novels, the events here come much later than the dark years of the Occupation which have provided him with his richest harvest: the '60s, with l’Affaire Ben Barka.
Mehdi Ben Barka was a Moroccan politician, leader of the left-wing National Union of Popular Forces, active in various anti-colonial movements, and considered dangerous both by France and the United States. After being exiled, he settled in Paris, vanishing in 1965. It was said that he had been kidnapped by, variously, French officers, the CIA or by a Moroccan government minister, interrogated, tortured, his body dissolved in a vat of acid. His remains have never been found.
Modiano doesn’t concentrate on Ben Barka’s disappearance or the rumors that swirled around afterwards as to what, exactly, had happened to him and who had been responsible for his fate. Rather, he deals with the months prior to it, when the character called Aghamouri and various hangers-on, including Dannie, the young woman who draws Jean into this universe, are holed up in a third-rate Montparnasse hotel. Jean is there, and he is not there, already separating himself from this enigmatic group of people. As they sit in the lobby he stops to look at them through the plate-glass window and thinks: “Perhaps the glass was opaque from inside, like a one-way mirror. Or else, very simply, dozens and dozens of years stood between us: they remained frozen in the past, in the middle of that hotel lobby, and we no longer lived, they and I, in the same space of time.”
In an interview that appeared around the time of the book’s publication in France, Modiano states,
Paris in the sixties was very menacing, a dark and troubled time, coming so soon after the war in Algeria. I was on my own, I was a minor, I wasn’t studying. Paris at that time frightened me. You’d meet people older than oneself who would draw you into their world. But I liked mixing with all kinds of people, observing them as through the glass of an aquarium. I felt even then that one day I would put them in my books.
As he writes in The Black Notebook, “...it’s only much later that you can finally understand what you lived through and who those people really were, on condition that someone finally gives you the key to decipher a coded language.” And, like his creator, Jean is a dedicated note-taker, a man who writes down names, addresses, phone numbers, names of streets, as though to prove they truly existed, that they hadn’t simply dissolved into the air, like a dream or the trace of a memory. From reading his memoir, Pedigree, we learn that Modiano, as a young man, watched his world fall away from him. Too preoccupied with her own life as an actress, his mother barely tolerated him (unless she needed money, at which point she would drag him off to the pawn shop to hock his latest literary prize, in one case an expensive fountain pen; she grabbed the money and walked out the door), while his father, a complicated man who, during the Occupation, rode the gray line between collaboration and the black market, basically shunned his eldest son, once even summoning the police to arrest Patrick when the young man came knocking on his apartment door. Taking notes, defining a solid, albeit changing Paris was (and undoubtedly still is) Modiano’s way of situating his place in the world, of finding something dependable and concrete that is there today and would be there tomorrow. Or else it would simply vanish, as did the original of the hotel that lies at the geographical heart of The Black Notebook.
Life is a routine, one day after another, while the big events take place as though in another galaxy, and yet briefly, intimately, they sometimes touch us, gently nudging us like one billiard ball tapping another before rolling away and vanishing into a distant pocket. This is the universe of Patrick Modiano, as each of his novels explores this subtle zone where history collides, even momentarily, with our own reality. It was quite simple,” Thérèse states in Little Jewel,
“that evening, there is a girl with brown hair, scarcely nineteen, sitting on the banquette of a café in Place Blanche. You are five foot three inches tall, and you are wearing an off-white woollen cable-knit jumper. You’re going to stay there a bit longer, and then that will be the end of it. You are there because you wanted to go back to the past one last time to try to understand. Right there, under the electric light, in Place Blanche, is where everything began. For the last time, you went back to your home country, to the beginning, to find out if there was a different path to take and if things could have turned out differently.
What’s vivid doesn’t always lead us to the truth; it’s what lies in between that may show us the way.

My daughter, the Apple fan, gave me the book because I’d tell her the odd Jobs story. I was sort of, “What?” opening the present, though I was polite, with a thanks.

It left me feeling even worse about him. I’ll see the flick now, but your iPod Mini story is the whole story, the monopolist control freak messing with a kid’s allowance and odd jobs money. For what? Obsessive compulsive disorder?

But more, it’s the viciousness, that self-hating fanatics are the bane of humanity. Besides the damage he’s done to so many people, HOW COME SOMEONE IN HIS POSITION DIDN’T MAKE SURE WE HAD FLAWLESS COMPUTER LANGUAGES BY NOW? Look, railroads had to get together to agree on width between tracks so any train could go anywhere. But this monopolistic control freak did the opposite of what the world needed him to do with computers.

Life asks us that we do what we can to fix our mental illness, not just so we get the most out of ourselves for itself, for ourselves, but so we don’t inflict it on others. I wouldn’t wish someone dead, specially since he’s dead, but we would’ve done fine without him. – specially since it’s clear that he certainly did not teach America the lesson to watch out for self-hating monopolistic control-freak fanatics.

It was only when Kushner started writing her book that she made a discovery that is vital to any novelist trying to spin fiction out of historical events: the great danger is emptying your notebook, becoming lulled by your research into forgetting that novels are, first and last, works of the imagination.

SOPA would have expanded the arsenal of cease-and-desist tactics that the entertainment industry has been deploying ineffectively for the last 15 years, starting with the crackdowns on file-sharers. Copyright holders would have been able to create an embargo against websites allegedly violating their copyrights by compelling payment processors and ad networks to suspend their services, with very little recourse for contesting the accusation.

We’d walk into a McDonald’s and smell the familiar fried food and order the same burger and French fries and I'd taste the idea of home on my tongue. I would awake to the realization that this taste could be home.

Ferrante validates women’s experience in a way that recognizes our common humanity. Her work distinguishes between who we are and the imprint of social class and origins. It may seem a stretch to consider Ferrante in the same breath with Proust, Faulkner, and Dickens, but I’m convinced of her stature as one of the greatest writers and artists of this or any other time.